With New Year’s approaching I can’t help but think of the classic movie The Blue Angel, in which hot young Marlene Dietrich lures doddering Emil Jannings away from academe and into burlesque. The last scene shows the old guy back at his deserted schoolroom, still in the chicken suit from their nightclub act. He clutches at his old desk, weeping, emitting pathetic little chicken noises, as the enormity of his squandered life comes crushing down on him.
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Perhaps Bob too would be wearing a ridiculous costume–the tattered rags from some forgotten Bexley High School play. And he too would weep, as memories from the wasted year just past assailed him. The bells on his costume would jingle derisively as he moved through the dim hallways.
We need not rely upon such conjecture to delineate the enormity of Bob’s failure this year, pleasurable as it may be. There’s an engine now available that can outline Bob’s offenses against thought and journalism with greater precision than mere subjective adjectives like “repetitive” or “infantile” or “dull” ever could.
But why limit ourselves to the past year? The Trib archives also have a 1985-1995 search mode. You can view the full scope and horror of Bob Greene’s world, the sad spectacle of his near-autistic fixation, suffocating narrowness, and tedious, head-crushing repetition.
Michael Jordan appears in 67 columns, just three more times than the word “mall” appears. Spend enough hours working the archives, and weird parallels will start to pop out. In his column of June 6, 1994, the word “Elvis” is repeated 23 times; exactly two months later, a column repeats the word “mall” 23 times. Of the 32 columns containing the word “brave,” each uses “brave” exactly three times, except for the November 13, 1991, column, “The U.S. Shrinks to the Size of a Mall,” which uses it five times.
